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Book Portrays Eichmann as Evil, but Not Banal

Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem.Credit
John Milli/Israeli Government Press Office, via Getty Images

More than 50 years after its publication, Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” remains enduringly controversial, racking up a long list of critics who continue to pick apart her depiction of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as an exemplar of “the banality of evil,” a bloodless, nearly mindless bureaucrat who “never realized what he was doing.”

Bettina Stangneth, the author of “Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer,” published in an English translation this week by Alfred A. Knopf, didn’t aim to join those critics. An independent philosopher based in Hamburg, she was interested in the nature of lies, and set out around 2000 to write a study of Eichmann, the Third Reich’s head of Jewish affairs, who was tried in Israel in 1961, in light of material that has emerged in recent decades.

Then, while reading through the voluminous memoirs and other testimony Eichmann produced while in hiding in Argentina after the war, Ms. Stangneth came across a long note he wrote, dismissing the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, that flew in the face of Arendt’s notion of Eichmann’s “inability to think.”

“I sat at my desk for three days, thinking about it,” Ms. Stangneth said in a telephone interview from her home. “I was totally shocked. I could not believe this man was able to write something like this.”

Ms. Stangneth’s book cites that document and a mountain of others to offer what some scholars say is the most definitive case yet that Eichmann, who was hanged in 1962, wasn’t the order-following functionary he claimed to be at his trial, but a fanatically dedicated National Socialist.

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Bettina Stangneth, author of “Eichmann Before Jerusalem,” says documents show that Eichmann was an enthusiastic Nazi.Credit
Eva Haeberle for The New York Times

If previous researchers have seriously dented Arendt’s case, Ms. Stangneth “shatters” it, said Deborah E. Lipstadt, a historian at Emory University and the author of a 2011 book about the Eichmann trial.

The facts about Eichmann in Argentina have been dribbling out, “but she really puts flesh on the bones,” Dr. Lipstadt said. “This was not a guy who just happened to do a dirty job, but someone who played a crucial role and did it with wholehearted commitment.”

While Ms. Stangneth maintains that Arendt, who died in 1975, was fooled by Eichmann’s performance on the stand, she sees her less as a foil than as an indispensable intellectual companion.

“It wasn’t my plan to write a historian’s book, just arguing against Arendt with historical facts,” Ms. Stangneth said. “To understand someone like Eichmann, you have to sit down and think with him. And that’s a philosopher’s job.”

“Eichmann Before Jerusalem,” based on research in more than 30 archives, certainly contains plenty of eye-opening facts, including the revelation that in 1956 Eichmann had drafted an open letter to the West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer — discovered by Ms. Stangneth in a trove of Eichmann’s papers held in German state archives — proposing that he return to his homeland to stand trial.

Ms. Stangneth also describes the sometimes surprisingly open postwar networks that protected Eichmann, as well as the reluctance of West German officials — who knew where Eichmann was as early as 1952, according to classified documents published in 2011 by the German tabloid Bild — to bring him and other former Nazis to justice.

Such revelations drew headlines when Ms. Stangneth’s book appeared in Germany in 2011, the 50th anniversary of the Eichmann trial, contributing to renewed debate about whether Germany’s postwar government had made a complete break with the past. (The full 3,400-page file on Eichmann held by the German intelligence service, the BND, has yet to be declassified.)

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In “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Hannah Arendt, above, argued that Eichmann didn’t realize what he was doing as he organized and carried out the Holocaust.Credit
Tyrone Dukes/The New York Times

But the core of “Eichmann Before Jerusalem,” which was translated into English by Ruth Martin, is a detailed portrait of Eichmann and the circle of former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers surrounding him in Argentina, based largely on materials previously available to scholars but never, Ms. Stangneth said, fully or systematically mined.

“We waste a lot of time waiting for spectacular new material,” she said. “We haven’t sat down and taken a very close look at the material we have.”

That material forms a veritable mountain. Eichmann’s testimony in Jerusalem runs to thousands of pages of transcripts, notes and handwritten texts, including a 1,200-page memoir he produced after the trial.

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Ms. Stangneth, building on the work of others, has also pieced together the so-called Argentina Papers, a tangle of more than 1,300 pages of handwritten memoirs, notes and transcripts of secret interviews of Eichmann in 1957 by Willem Sassen, a Dutch journalist and former Nazi living in Buenos Aires.

The Sassen transcripts, scattered across three German archives in incomplete and confusingly paginated copies, have long been known to scholars, and small portions were submitted as evidence in Eichmann’s trial, where he dismissed them as loose “pub talk.” (Two brief, edited excerpts also ran in Life magazine.)

Ms. Stangneth uncovered hundreds of pages of previously unknown transcripts in mislabeled files. She also found evidence that the Sassen circle included more people than scholars had previously recognized, among them Ludolf von Alvensleben, former adjutant to Heinrich Himmler, whose participation in some of the interviews, she said, had gone undetected.

Together, in Ms. Stangneth’s depiction, these men formed a kind of perverse book club, meeting almost weekly at Sassen’s home to work through the emerging public narrative of the Holocaust, discussing every volume and article they could get their hands on, including ones by “enemy” authors. Their goal was to provide material for a book that would expose the Holocaust as a Jewish exaggeration — “the lie of the six million,” as one postwar Nazi publication in Argentina put it. But Eichmann had another, contradictory goal: to claim his place in history.

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Adolf Eichmann in a prison yard in Israel in 1961.Credit
John Milli/Israeli Government Press Office via Getty Images

The facts and figures confirming the scale of the slaughter piled up as Eichmann recounted the rigors of what he called (without irony, Ms. Stangneth notes) his “killer of a job.” Ms. Stangneth quotes a long Eichmann tirade on his “duty to our blood” — “If 10.3 million of these enemies had been killed,” he declared of the Jews, “then we would have fulfilled our duty” — that left his sympathetic listeners unnerved.

“I cannot tell you anything else, for it is the truth!” Eichmann said. “Why should I deny it?”

For the Sassen circle, Ms. Stangneth writes, this tirade marked the end of the fantasy that Eichmann would help them defend “pure National Socialism” against the slanderous charges of its enemies. For Eichmann, the Sassen conversations were good practice for Jerusalem, where his Israeli interrogator, Ms. Stangneth writes, noted his facility in answering historical questions, although in service of a very different image of himself.

If Arendt, like many others, was taken in, some historians say, his performance still led her to valuable insights about the mentality of many of those who carried out the killing on the ground.

“She had the right type but the wrong guy,” said the historian Christopher R. Browning, the author of “Ordinary Men,” an influential 1992 study of a German police battalion that killed tens of thousands of Jews in Poland. “There were all sorts of people like Eichmann was pretending to be, which is why his strategy worked.”

Listening to Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt saw an “inability to think.” Listening to Eichmann before Jerusalem, Ms. Stangneth sees a master manipulator skilled at turning reason, that weapon of the enemy, against itself.

“As a philosopher, you want to protect thinking as something beautiful,” she said. “You don’t want to think that someone who is able to think does not also love it.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 3, 2014, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Book Portrays Genocidal Nazi as Evil, but Not Banal. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe